Bolivia reacted with fury after a plane carrying the country's president home from Russia was diverted to Vienna amid suspicions that it was carrying the surveillance whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

France and Portugal were accused of withdrawing permission for the plane, carrying the president, Evo Morales, from energy talks in Moscow, to pass through their airspace.

Both Bolivia and Austria deny that Snowden is on board, but no one has been allowed to check. Since being forced to land in Vienna, Morales has now been given permission by France and Portugal to overfly their territory, but not by Spain, which had also refused. The simultaneous revocation of permission to pass over these countries looks rather suspicious. The Bolivian defense minister, Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight, has no doubts about who is behind it:

"This is a hostile act by the United States State Department which has used various European governments."

The Bolivian Vice-President said they had been "kidnapped by imperialism" in Europe.
That framing has now been taken up by other South American governments, who have expressed their outrage at the insult to Bolivia and hence their region. As The Guardian reports in an update on the Bolivian story:

Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner has tweeted that she has been advised that Peruvian president Ollanta Humala will call a meeting of the Union of South American Nations [UNASUR] to discuss ongoing events.

Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, has also railed against what he called an "affront to our America," and called on his fellow South American presidents to "take action".

Posting on Twitter, Correa wrote: "Decisive hours for UNASUR! Either we graduated from the colonies, or we claim our independence, sovereignty and dignity. We are all Bolivia!"

There is clearly a lot of political grandstanding and opportunism here. But there seems no doubt that this latest development will sour relationships between the US and South American nations, at least for a while. Spain and Portugal also come out of this badly, and are likely to lose influence among their former South American colonies. This latest incident shows once again the impact of Snowden's actions, which continue to cause major ripples throughout the entire diplomatic world.

from the like-that-wasn't-predictable dept

For years now, we've talked about how various newspapers (and local governments) around the globe were arguing that Google News was somehow unfairly cheating them out of revenues (even as they sent a ton of traffic to those sites, often to visitors who wouldn't have visited the pages at all otherwise). Back in December, we saw that Google "settled" a long running dispute with Belgian newspapers, with part of it being an "agreement" to buy a bunch of advertising to effectively pay off the newspapers. Then, in February, Google did a similar deal in France, this time to the tune of $82 million. Of course, it didn't take long for people to point out that this sets an awful precedent for the internet, as these legacy publishers now believe they have a legitimate argument that sites should pay to link to them.

And, of course, newspapers in lots of other countries were paying attention. While Google has insisted that those two deals "won't be replicated" elsewhere in Europe, it appears that newspaper publishers elsewhere in Europe would like to test that claim. Media companies in Portugal are first up to the plate, demanding that Google pay up:

"Our position is that the content has to be paid for ... We showed that our focus is to be paid for Google News using our news," he said, adding that the two sides planned to continue regular meetings.

A Google spokeswoman said the company "does not comment on private meetings held by its teams".

Maybe, next time, Google should stand up for its principles on deals like this, even in the face of political pressure. Because giving in and paying up only means that pretty much every country with a struggling media business (meaning, most countries) is going to come calling before too long...

from the backbone,-what's-that? dept

Back in February last year, Techdirt wrote about the rather pathetic attempts of the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) to drum up some support among its members for a new copyright levy on storage devices in the face of a public outcry at the extra costs this would impose on consumer and professional products. This was a dismal failure, and so it's probably no surprise that the Portuguese government didn't move forward with the original plans.

Via Nelson Cruz, we learn that there have been some further developments in this area recently. On January 4, SPA suddenly announced that it was taking the Portuguese government to court for failing to bring in the new copyright levy (original in Portuguese.) And then, just as unexpectedly, the next day it said that it was suspending the legal action. The reason for this change of heart was the intervention of Portugal's Secretary of State for Culture, who got in touch with the president of SPA, and promised to place the copyright levy law before parliament by the end of the month.

It's hard to see why the Portuguese government is capitulating like this when there is so little support for the new law, both among the Portuguese electorate and even among artists, as our previous story reported. That lack of spine is particularly regrettable given the following statement from SPA (original in Portuguese):

the issue of private copying is resolved in all EU countries, except in Portugal, a situation that causes losses of millions of euros to the authors.

This gives the impression that "all" EU countries have copyright levies, but that's certainly not the case. As detailed research carried out in 2011 reported, five out of the 27 EU members states do not have copyright levies -- UK, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg. Moreover, when the Hargreaves Review recommended that the UK government bring in a limited private copying exception without compensation, it explained its reasoning as follows:

As right holders are well aware of consumers' behaviour in this respect [of making private copies], our view is that the benefit of being able to do this is already factored into the price that right holders are charging. A limited private copying exception which corresponds to the expectations of buyers and sellers of copyright content, and is therefore already priced into the purchase, will by definition not entail a loss for right holders.

So not only are copyright levies not universal in Europe, but they are unnecessary, since they can be replaced by ordinary pricing mechanisms that are fairer to users and artists. It's a pity the Portuguese government doesn't seem to realize that rather than meekly acquiescing to the demands of SPA, a far better option would be to abolish copyright levies altogether.

from the one-world-one-vision dept

As could probably be expected after its quick trip through the Congress, Panama's 510 Bill became law last Friday, granting its Copyright Office unprecedented power to pursue filesharers directly. But this is only one of several problems with the 510 Bill. The bill goes further than any US law, extending copyright protection to buffer copies and content stored in cache.

Transient copies, such as buffer copies on a computer’s random access memory (RAM), are necessary for a host of streaming services that carry content over the internet to end users. Recognizing a right to exclude such copies, in addition to the ultimate right to distribute the content itself, adds another layer of licensing requirements that can block innovative services (like Netflix or Pandora) from being offered. Many other trade agreements and national and regional laws contain explicit exceptions for “transient” or “incidental” copies necessary for technological or other communications. But the Panama Free Trade Agreement contains nothing of the kind, and neither does Panama’s law. By extending protection to temporary electronic storage, with no clear exception for transient electronic copies – the Panama bill fails to give internet service providers and other businesses the legal certainty they need to enter and maintain operations in Panama’s market.

The law also severely limits fair use, moving from an open-ended clause to a "closed list" system which narrowly defines fair use limitations and exceptions. The US has an open system, much to the chagrin of various content industries. Moving other nations to this more restrictive standard first will make it easier to bring ourselves in line with several other nations sometime down the road.

Users' rights are also being narrowly defined, erasing any trace of "balance" in Panama's copyright law. Between the severely limited fair use, the extension of protection to cover nearly every file that moves through a user's computer during normal internet usage and the government's ability to pursue filesharers with the burden of proof falling to the citizens, the public is left with nearly nothing.

Compare this legislation with Portugal's response to filesharing: a "hands off" approach to non-commercial infringement and the recognition that an IP address isn't necessarily a person. I would imagine that Panama's copyright office won't be interested in making that distinction, not when bonuses are at stake.

Is there a huge cultural difference in play here or is it just varying levels of pressure from content controllers (used to differentiate from content "creators," not all of whom espouse the same view as the industry "representatives")? Up until recently, Spain's view on filesharing was roughly the same as Portugal's, a viewpoint that seemed to draw extra attention (read: "pressure") from the US government and its associated trade organizations.

Colombia pushed through incredibly extreme copyright legislation ahead of a visit from President Obama, ignoring an outraged public which had staged SOPA-style protests during the law's debut months earlier. Spain, like Portugal, also considered filesharing legal, until the US stepped in and rewrote its copyright laws after smacking it around with an appearance on the Special 301 report. Switzerland pushed back against outrageous Hollywood-backed claims about filesharing and is now on The List. Canada recently went through some copyright reform of its own, but apparently not to the liking of the entertainment industry, which has suggested it will simply overwrite the parts it doesn't like with the TPP.

The end result is the US government using protectionist policies to force cultural change on other countries, shifting legislative viewpoints to match up with corporate demands which routinely exceed the severity of our existing laws. In essence, "your culture is wrong." Should the US government be in the business (and it is very much a business) of applying "our" moral standard on other countries, especially when non-conformance is subject to threats implicit and explicit?

It's been stated here before that infringement is not a moral issue, but those pushing for harsher legislation and more enforcement abroad certainly believe it is. Making countries subject to compliance with an arbitrary moral standard (written by certain industries) as a prerequisite for entering an advantageous trade agreement doesn't create copyright converts. Instead, it creates the IP equivalent of "rice Christians" who allow the US to rewrite their IP laws in order to prevent being locked out of beneficial agreements by one of the most prosperous nations in the world. The end result is coerced compliance that runs roughshod over existing IP laws at the expense of their own constituents.

Applying a new moral standard via the institution of new laws that only benefit the industries being catered to sounds a lot like an advantaged group using its governmental patrons to conform the world to its preferred standards. The government of perhaps the most powerful nation in the world at your fingertips is the sort of thing that no industry, no matter how "beleaguered," should ever have at its disposal.

The end result is an entertainment industry occupation by proxy. The limitations enacted in order to enter a free trade agreement put these countries at a severe disadvantage by crippling local tech industries. Opening trade means very little when innovation is thwarted by legislative overreach.

Free trade agreements have great potential to unleash new competition in markets, producing better products and services at lower prices. This assumes, however, that these agreements actually lower barriers to trade.

Unfortunately, due to misaligned priorities and poor drafting, the U.S. Government’s framework for free trade agreements has neglected aspects of U.S. law that are instrumental to a flourishing Internet sector, and in doing so has erected new barriers to tech exports.

The trend of expanding liability and constraining the balancing provisions of copyright law also manifested recently in Colombia. Also responding to a recently enacted Free Trade Agreement with the United States, Colombia hurriedly passed a controversial copyright revision this spring which similarly left little flexibility for technology innovation. The upshot of the copyright law revisions in these countries is to erode certainty and discourage investment by online services, e-commerce platforms, device manufacturers, and ISPs. This is not lowering barriers to market access.

It would be a mistake to understand this as solely an issue affecting U.S. exports, however. In fact, it is a more serious issue for our trading partners, because while U.S. firms may look to more fertile export markets, Colombian and Panamanian firms must survive at home before they can reasonably expand abroad.

An economy stifled by restrictive additions to existing IP laws puts the continuing development in the hands of American special interests who don't actually care whether or not a country thrives as long as their own interests are protected. Sabotaging innovation to protect legacy business models is nothing more than imperialism redefined. The entertainment industry, speaking through the government, is now an occupation force, one that uses "free trade" as a cover for top down dominance of the native population by removing protections, erecting barriers and excluding the affected constituents from the legislative process.

from the holy-sanity,-batman dept

In a move that should remind you of Spain's ruling that personal file-sharing was legal, before America's entertainment industry helpfully wrote the Spanish people a new law (wait...what!!?!?), file-sharing for personal use has been declared legal in Portugal. How could something so monumental happen, you wonder? Well, funny story: the entertainment industry made it happen.

The tale goes something like this. An anti-piracy group sponsored by the entertainment industry called ACAPOR got all uppity about Portuguese filesharing a year ago and decided to helpfully deliver boxes (yes, physical boxes) of IP addresses suspected of filesharing infringing files to Portugal's Attorney General's office. They did this while wearing shirts that proclaimed "Piracy is illegal" in case anyone thought they were there for a cause that is actually useful and/or interesting.

“We are doing anything we can to alert the government to the very serious situation in the entertainment industry,” ACAPOR commented at the time, adding that “1000 complaints a month should be enough to embarrass the judiciary system.”

Secure in their knowledge that justice would be done, ACAPOR's minions then went home and did whatever it is these kinds of people do when they aren't making fantastic amounts of noise and generally making fools of themselves.

Well, as is their duty, the folks at the Attorney General's office did look through the boxes of evidence ACAPOR had provided...and promptly threw them out.

The Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DIAP) looked into the complaints and the prosecutor came back with his order this week. Contrary to what the anti-piracy group had hoped for, the 2,000 IP-addresses will not be taken to court. Worse for ACAPOR, the prosecutor goes even further by ruling that file-sharing for personal use is not against the law.

“From a legal point of view, while taking into account that users are both uploaders and downloaders in these file-sharing networks, we see this conduct as lawful, even when it’s considered that the users continue to share once the download is finished.”

Oops. Turns out those "Piracy is illegal" shirts are as ill-informed about the law in Portugal as the people wearing them. Especially since, for good measure, the AG informed ACAPOR that IP addresses are not people, so their evidence wasn't so much "evidence" as it was "a horrific waste of time and trees".

Now, not one to let facts get in the way of saying something stupid, ACAPOR boss Nuno Pereira pushed back on the AG's office.

“Personally I think the prosecutors just found a way to adapt the law to their interest – and their interest is not having to send 2,000 letters, hear 2,000 people and investigate 2,000 computers,” Pereira says.

Sure, that makes sense. Everyone knows if you're looking to avoid having to send letters and do paperwork, becoming a lawyer is the way to go. But did you really expect an anti-piracy group to take a sane thumping gracefully?

Of course, as we've seen elsewhere, whenever a country reacts sensibly concerning things like file sharing, the entertainment industry lobbying engine revs right back up... and suddenly the countries are described by US politicians in the worst possible terms. Any bets on whether or not Portugal just wrote itself onto the USTR's Special 301 list and the Congressional Anti-Piracy Caucus' "watch list"?

from the two-internets dept

Susan Crawford believes telecommunications in America are going through the biggest crisis ever, and this is just as bad as the banking crisis was. Monday, at the Freedom 2 Connect conference, the Internet law scholar and former Special Assistant for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at the White House, laid out what's wrong with broadband in America, hinting and what needs to be done to fix it. It's not going to be easy.

"The stakes are extraordinarily high, this has been an incremental crisis for a long time but now it's an actual crisis," said Crawford, whose book analyzing these issues, Captive Audience, will be published in November. The central issue is the so-called digital divide and what Crawford refers to as the "looming cable monopoly." Due to deregulation, which was predicated on the premise that
the free market and competition would protect consumers, cable companies have found themselves with an inordinate amount of power to control the Internet and broadband access while, at the same time, traditional phone companies like AT&T are struggling to keep up and veering towards wireless services.

To support her thesis, Crawford presented some stunning numbers. In the last two years, Comcast market share has grown from 16.3 million subscribers to 18.5, a 14 percent growth. Time Warner Cable has grown 10 percent, from 9.2 to 10.7 million customers. Meanwhile, DSL subscribers have plummeted: AT&T and Verizon market share is down 22 and 21 percent respectively.

So, while it's good to be Comcast, it's not good to be an American citizen. Without competition, there's
no drive to improve the service. The average speed of an Internet connection in the United States is
around 5Mbit/s. An astoundingly low number if you look at other western countries. South Korea, for
example, has an average of 50Mbit/s. And faster connections are starting to be implemented around the
world. One gigabit connections are available in countries like Japan, Portugal or Sweden and at much
better prices than in the U.S. – in Hong Kong, connecting at one gigabit per second costs $26 a month
while in Chattanooga, TN, it costs $350.

What does this mean to the average citizen? It means the United States are giving up their leadership.
Crawrford said this means “the next Google won't come from America.” And, even within U.S.
borders, there's a fundamental problem: you either pay premium for a mediocre service or you are left
behind.

“We end up with two Internets, two societies in America,” Crawford said to me in an interview.

One America does some tweeting and Facebook on their inferior, slower wireless devices. The other
America not only gets to enjoy video online, but they can also apply for jobs, do video-conferencing,
get an education online and, ultimately, live in the 21st century. Crawford argues that this digital divide
ends up creating inequality between the haves and have-nots in America.

The only solution, Crawford argues, is for the government to intervene and regulate. Internet access, particularly high-speed access, should be treated “as a utility, just as electricity, gas and water.” Doing
so would make the Internet a natural monopoly in which the government would provide the pipe and
guarantee equal opportunity of access to everybody.

It might not happen immediately, but Crawford hopes that, with her influence and that of other thinkers
like her, this will come to the forefront of the public discussion. She believes that, eventually, in every
district, there will be elected officials who understand and care about these issues. That will be when
we'll be able to look for a solution. "We make this a voting issue, that's how we fight back."

from the and-here's-a-playlist dept

Nelson Cruz points us to the latest news of totally ridiculous and disproportionate punishments for file sharing. A young man in Portugal has been convicted on criminal charges for sharing 3 songs. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail, but the jail sentence was suspended, and instead he has to pay €880. While the report notes he was apparently sharing more songs, the charges only covered 3 songs. To make it clear just how ridiculous this is, Nelson also put together a YouTube playlist with all three songs -- showing that they're all available to share in this manner legally. Today. Back in 2006, because of the industry's own stupidity, such services were not readily available. If they were, the kid likely would have used such a legal service. So how is it that what this kid did was so horrible that it deserves a criminal conviction? It seems like all he really did was help show the industry what the public was looking for.

Of course, the ridiculousness doesn't stop there. The local Portuguese version of the RIAA, called the AFP, appears to be using this case as an example of why they need a Hadopi-style three strikes law in Portugal. The problem? It took nearly six years to convict this kid for daring to share 3 songs. Of course, it took nearly as long for the industry to get its act together and offer legal services. Perhaps we should give that a go for a while before we start passing new laws that kick people off the internet, yes?

from the idea-whose-time-has-passed dept

Few ideas display a sense of entitlement better than that of private copying levies. For they assume, by definition, that artists' representatives have a right to money from the public simply because there is some kind of storage that could be used to hold digital copies of copyright files, and that every time such a file is copied, money must be paid (never mind if you are just making backups or transferring your holdings to bigger storage sizes.)

This is based on the outmoded idea that the public are simply consumers, and ignores the fact that today they are also creators. Take digital photos, for example: since there is no cost involved in taking as many pictures as you wish -- unlike in the world of analog photography, where film and processing expenses act as a brake on creativity -- a typical collection of family snaps can easily run to many gigabytes. Moreover, most digital cameras also allow videos to be shot, and these generate even larger quantities of data. As a result, an increasing proportion of the data stored on devices has nothing to do with commercial works, and yet the full levy must still be paid.

A further problem is that the capacities of hard disks are now so large that even relatively low per-gigabyte rates generate significant additional costs when applied to disks with terabyte capacities, say. A case in point is the amended scale for Portugal's private copying levies, announced last month. According to an article in Exame Informatica (original in Portuguese), a 1 terabyte hard disk currently priced around $90 will cost $120 under the new scheme, while a 2 terabyte hard drive that costs $130 now will go up to $200. But this isn't just about hard drives. USBs, smartphones and even multifunction printers will all be subject to the new levy.

Naturally, the prospect of these surcharges is proving unpopular with the Portuguese public. And so the SPA (Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores -- Portuguese Society of Authors), which represents Portuguese artists in all areas -- music, audiovisual, dance, plastic arts and cinema -- decided to show how the country's creators really backed the move. The Portuguese blogger Miguel Caetano Carlos Martins describes what happened:

SPA has tried to validate their point by presenting a list of one hundred authors and artists that support this PL118 law. There's no denying that some author might think its a good idea... even though it might look suspicious that they could get only a hundred of them among their 25k+ registered members; and even though that roughly 20% of those 100 are the association board members; the really horrendous part is that we now found that some of those names were put there without any consent from the authors!

[Update: there are now apparently 200 names on the list - still rather a poor showing for such a large association.] If even a national organization for all categories of artists can't muster genuine support for such measures, it's clearly time to get rid of the whole antiquated approach. Inflated prices for digital devices will be a real drag on innovation in Portugal at a time when it is trying to modernize itself. Moreover, the manifest lack of enthusiasm for the SPA's attempt to mobilize support for the higher levies suggests that the creators themselves derive little benefit from the scheme.

from the um,-wow dept

This is just insane. While we've talked in the past about how difficult it is to put your own work into the public domain by choice, apparently the Portuguese Socialist Party (which is currently in power) is trying to reform its copyright laws so that you can't waive or renounce your copyright on anything. As the report notes, this would effectively make Creative Commons illegal. Even worse, it would effectively make it against the law for you to try to put your own work into the public domain! The proposed law states that:

The equitable compensation of authors, artists, interpreters or executives is inalienable and non-renunciable, being null any other contractual clause in contrary.

The Ministry of Culture apparently claims that it's making this change to establish "greater and more effective protection for creators and cultural creation." Except, of course, that's not what this would do at all. Taking away the rights of content creators to free up their own works, and to either put them in the public domain or license them out in more permissive means, doesn't help content creators at all. Those who want to keep the strictest nature of copyright laws still have that ability, but those who realize the importance of sharing their works to both establish a greater reputation and to contribute more widely to culture, would no longer be able to do so. What a ridiculous suggestion.

from the gotta-blame-someone dept

paperbag was the first of a whole bunch of you to send in the news of Blockbuster declaring bankruptcy in Portugal and claiming that it's all the fault of those darn kids and their downloading. Well, more specifically, it blames the government for not doing enough to stop the sun from rising every morning... I mean, from stopping people from engaging in unauthorized file trading online. This is just an excuse for a company that failed to execute. The number of folks accessing unauthorized movies online is still a blip, and almost certainly had little impact on Blockbuster's bottom line. The simple fact is that Blockbuster, worldwide, has done a really poor job of adapting to a changing world.